Olympics 2008

[Strangler Lewis]

Didn't see it all, but as Olympic closing ceremony hooey goes, that was quite beautiful. However, it was also a little frightening, in a "we will bury you" sense. Lots of war drums, and all those little people scampering up and coming off that tower reminded me of Cloverfield.

[Moonliner]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

The Olympic Village.

2+ weeks of the most perfect bodies in the entire world living together in close quarters and at their physical peaks.

Oh yeah, they're tooootally doing it. A lot.

I wonder who got the most gold medals.

Would Phelps count as one or eight?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by €uroMeinke

Indeed I love the contrast of Beijing and the thousand performers in uniform precision, versus the messy diversity of London - one can only think of the fright the Chinese felt to that display of wanton decadence and Rock n Roll.

That bit made me want to see the Beijing part of the Athens closing ceremonies, so we found it on YouTube. While not quite as...garish (and I mean that with love) as the London stuff we just saw, it gave absolutely no hint of the opening ceremony to come.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Heehee, the mayor of London was an overgrown UK schoolboy. He was cracking me up. Nice finale, though the part they called the " athletes party" featured opera singing? Hell of a party...

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Heehee, the mayor of London was an overgrown UK schoolboy. He was cracking me up.

"Who, me? I'm supposed to take the flag? Cool!"

[BarTopDancer]

Watching the closing ceremonies, and the montages reinforced that we are one world. Yes, we think China is fvcked up government wise but their people are still people. Our government isn't anything to write home about these days either. Some people want change, some don't. But like Middle East, it's not really our place to impose our thoughts of an ideal country on them. We can express our disagreement but we aren't their mother.

It wasn't that long ago that Los Angeles was living in a constant state of smog. We cleaned it up, but it wasn't overnight.

We are one world, it's all we have and in the end all it's people bleed the same color.

[mousepod]

Wow. I had such a different impression of the closing ceremony. I thought that the beauty and precision of the opening ceremony was trashed in favor of a garish CdS-style spectacle. Maybe it was the crappy out-of-sync audio... maybe it was the giant phallic monument being f***ed by suspended gymnasts in bike helmets, maybe it was the "Logan's Run meets Tron" floating people... maybe it was the slo-mo British "dancers" running for the bus... probably it was all of the above. Yuck.

[Ghoulish Delight]

It was pretty standard fare for closing ceremonies I thought. They never match the opening. Among other things, as mentioned during the broadcast, the stadium is in use until a few hours before the closing ceremony starts, so they simply don't have time to put on a show that's even a fraction of the scale of the opening. So they tend to revert back to standard marching band and half time show theatrics. I thought there were some cool elements, but overall it dragged and was pretty unspectacular.

What's really of note is the fact that during the London segment, when the little girl came out of the bus and took the soccer ball from the other little girl, there were actually 2 other girls who had won a contest but they were deemed too ugly so the real winners were actually back stage exchanging a real soccer ball while the more acceptable looking girls exchanged a fake one for cameras.

[innerSpaceman]

I'm not sure if that was a joke or not, but it's why the snowball rolled downhill from me staying up too late to watch the Olympics to reverting to my original personal boycott plans.

I decided to be cool and not base my opinion of the Olympics on China's government as a whole. But things related to the Olympics were fair game. So it all started with the contest winning singer being too ugly for prime time. Why bother to have a contest then? Cover-up, scandalous. Then the 24 ethnic kids during the same ceremony were also fakes. Ugh.

Gets worse. The Chinese female gymnast gold medalist is an underage cheat with China's complicity.

Last straw for me: There are 3 official protest zones. They're probably in the hinterlands (so far, no different than current America, to our shame) ... but you can apply for a permit to protest the Olympics. Except, in the immortal words of Admiral Akbar ... It's A Trap! No permits are ever granted and almost every applicant is sentenced to years in a re-education camp.


Sorry, my disgust overflows. I already ranted about the moral complicity of everyone involved, from the IOC officials down to the Athletes themselves. But as for me, I'm not even a Neilson family of one ... but I had to look away.




So I'm relieved the closing ceremonies sucked. But I'm sad I didn't get to see any diving. Oh well, there's always London.

[Ghoulish Delight]

As someone who was in some part in favor of some level of boycott before the Olympics, I came away with a hopeful feeling after watching them. The hope being that what the world saw was a country with over a billion people who are being controlled by a few very paranoid and very corrupt people. That the vast majority of Chinese are just people who want to live happy lives just as you and I do but can't because their dominating government remains assbackwards and closed minded. I hope that the revelation of the government's sloppy and pathetic deceptions show them to be not a country to be feared, but a ruling class out of touch with reality to be ridiculed. I saw faces of average Chinese citizens that want to be part of the world community but have no idea how to do so and need a lot of help to get there.




Changing gears: Tae Kwon Do competitor from Cuba kicks referee in the face for disqualifying him. Nice.

CP and I watched the gold medal boxing match between a Chinese and Irish boxer. The announcers showed complete disdain for the result (the Chinese boxer won), flat out accusing the judges of favoritism at best, perhaps even corruption. It ocurred to me how often I've seen that in boxing. Then it ocurred to me why. We're talking about a sport and sporting community populated by people who spend their lives punching each other in the face. No matter how many rules you create, how tightly you try to control things, that's not going to change. You're not going to get reason, sportsmanship, and fairness. You're going to get punched in the face.